The past, present, and future of in-car infotainment

In the beginning, there was radio... then vinyl (?!)... and now apps integration rules.

For decades, car infotainment meant just a radio. Then tape decks began appearing, eventually being joined by CD players. Now, Tape decks have disappeared as a factory option (the last car to come with a tape player was sold in 2010), and the CD is entering a slow but inexorable decline. They're being replaced by smartphones and streaming media. Compared to even a few years ago, new cars are far more connected to the outside world. It's a trend that's only going to continue. The always-updating consumer electronics industry and the rapid rise of the smartphone have combined to condition consumers to an incredibly rapid pace of development. People expect new devices every couple of years that are faster and more powerful, and they’re bringing those expectations out of the Apple or Android or Microsoft store and into the car dealership. As we covered recently, this has created a new set of challenges and opportunities for the automakers. For a range of reasons, car companies simply have to work with product development cycles that are three to five times longer than the tech industry. This lag is most visible to end users in the context of infotainment systems, which have certainly come a long way from AM radios and road atlases.

In some regards, our cars and trucks are becoming smartphone peripherals. In the same way that parents decry their children (even their middle-aged adult children) using smartphones at the dinner table, many show no desire to give up the constant stream of social media or streamed content just because they’re driving. Of course, having one’s face buried in a phone is somewhat more dangerous when in control of thousands of pounds of vehicle. Car-appropriate interfaces are a big focus of the car industry these days.

Unlike when smartphones initially became an ever-present life force, these days car infotainment is not all about bringing your own device to the party. Mobile operating systems, persistent wireless connections, and screens large and small are increasingly being incorporated into new cars. As is common with emerging automotive technologies, this tends to begin with the luxury technobarges at the very top end of the new car market, but trickle-down is a real thing when it comes to vehicle specifications, thanks to the realities of purchasing.

Those privileged enough to have been in the market for such a car recently may have a good idea of the infotainment state of the art. Thanks to the great recession, however, for the rest of us—now keeping our old cars for ever longer—the brave new world awaits. What does that world entail? It might be a cliché that you can’t understand your present or your future without an understanding of your past, but it’s a cliché I happen to like, and to that end, let's take a quick look at the history of car infotainment before returning to the present day to see what the OEMs have up their sleeves.

History of car entertainment, pre-iPod

In the beginning, cars were just cars. Drivers only had the road to occupy their attention, and, on longer journeys, any entertainment had to come from their passengers. (In this regard, cars were only a mild upgrade from ye olden horse-drawn days.) This shouldn't be too surprising: after all, the first radio stations in the US didn't appear until the late 1920s, by which point Ford already built more than 15 million Model Ts. Radios began to be fitted to cars in the 1930s, something that may have made the Joad family's cross-country road trip a little more bearable as the Okies left depression- and drought-ravaged Oklahoma for a better life in California.

Radio was it as far as in-car entertainment for the next few decades, leaving the choice of programming solely in the power of those with the transmitters. Being a nation of individualists, this would never last. Cars gave Americans the freedom to travel where they wanted, and those free-roaming citizens wanted to be able to choose their own soundtracks. To that end, in the 1950s, Chrysler bravely tried to make in-car record players a thing, even though any vinyl enthusiast can tell you that technology prefers its environment to be vibration-free. Unsurprisingly, the in-car record player never really caught on. None of Chrysler's rivals bothered offering record players, and they disappeared from Chrysler's option list after only a few years. Magnetic tape eventually proved to be a much better technology for automotive applications than grooved vinyl. In America that meant the large 8-track format, but by the 1970s, we caught up with the rest of the world and settled on the compact cassette.

Cassettes had a lot going for them. They were small—about the size of a smartphone for those of you too young to have seen them in the wild—and they were cheap. You could buy them blank and easily fill them up with audio, enabling custom playlists (again, for you young 'uns out there, this is where the term mix tape comes from). Sure, the sound quality wasn't amazing, and they could twist or get caught up inside the player, best exemplified by Chris Rock, Allen Payne, and Deezer D in the movie CB4, but those were minor quibbles in the grand scheme of things. Quality improvements were limited to the addition of Dolby noise reduction and slightly higher-quality magnetic tape, but otherwise the tape player remained little changed over its lifespan.

Yes, this was a somewhat frequent occurrence with cassette tapes (warning, there's some explicit language in the first few seconds).

The standard-fit tape deck finally disappeared from our roads in 2010, Lexus taking the honors of being the last OEM to include a tape deck in its SC430. Had this piece come during Ars Technica’s early years, we’d probably have picked the compact disc as the biggest beneficiary of the tape’s slow demise. CD players started showing up in cars not long after their arrival on the market in the 1980s, offering much better sound quality than tape, even if the early ones were almost as intolerant of bumpy roads as vinyl. By the late 1990s, writable (and then rewritable) discs were cheap enough to be disposable, keeping the now increasingly inaccurately named mix tape alive. These days, even the CD player is starting to prepare for its exit. According to Alex Bellus, an Automotive Analyst with IHS Automotive, CD player sales in cars are expected to fall by 80 percent in the US by 2021, and worldwide by fifty percent over the same timeframe. Meanwhile, we enter this brave new world of more advanced digital technologies making the leap from your smartphone to your next car's dashboard.